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Voters in New Jersey tried out electronic voting machines for the second time today. But in Patterson this morning, voter Lisandro Rodriguez found that the machine had gotten ahead of itself.
AX 1
When I went in the booth I heard the beep, they were setting up the machine for me to vote and I see the Menendez light on and I got confused because I hadn't touched anything yet.
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Some voters, mainly in Essex county, were reporting that the light beside Democratic Candidate Menendez's name was already lit when they entered the booth. When they tried to select Thomas Kean, the republican senatorial candidate, they were unable to do so. In those cases voters were given emergency paper ballots. David Norcross at the New Jersey Republican National Committee charged that this was more than a computer glitch.
AX 2
we are saying that in various polling places in New Jersey today poll workers or somebody was pre-setting the machine for Senator Menendez.
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But Andrew Appel, a specialist in voter machine software at Princeton University, thinks tampering was very unlikely.
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if someone were to cheat by modifying the software, they would do so in a way so as to give no indication to the voter that something suspicious was going on
the sypmtoms described dont seem like symptoms of fraud by software.
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Appel points out that the glitches in New Jersey today highlight the need for a paper trail with electronic voting, which will be implemented in New Jersey starting in 2008.